Rumour stance classification is a task that is increasingly gaining popularity in its application to tweets. While Twitter is a generous source of reports of breaking news, outpacing even news outlets [1]}, it also comes with the caveat that some of those reports are still rumours at the time of posting and so are yet to be verified and corroborated [2]}, [3]}, [4]}. The rumour stance classification task intends to assist in this verification process by determining the type of support expressed in different tweets discussing the same rumour [5]}. Aggregation of the stance of multiple tweets discussing a rumour can then be of help to determine its likely veracity, enabling – among other benefits – the flagging of highly disputed rumours that are likely to be false.
